Minister’s Message
I woke this morning to the sight and sound of a scattering yellow leaves falling vigorously from the maple in our front yard. It seems early, yet I know that tree is not the healthiest. My weather app tells me that the skies in Seattle, where our son lives, are a gloomy gray. Such Seattle skies are not at all unusual, except a caption reads “Very Unhealthy Air Quality,” a result of the fires burning all over the West Coast.
These things, and many things, are not as they seem, certainly not as I want. My disorientation is affected by both climate crisis and COVID-19. A friend in Texas in her daily blog, which she calls her “Plague Journal,” has stopped referring to her “new normal” and reluctantly writes only “normal” for a day of physical distancing and safer at home. And systemic injustice persists. The family of Breona Taylor, killed in Louisville, KY by police executing a “No Knock” warrant at the wrong address, was awarded $12 million in a civil suit. Time will tell if promised reforms to policing strategies end unprovoked attacks on Black people. But what is the price of a human life, any human life, anyway?
Ugh! What is “new normal” or just plain “normal” now? How do any of us sustain ourselves, renew our fortitude, when so much can weigh us down? Let me take back that exclamation and say instead “Wow!” and “Whoa!” The world is not what I think it is, even when I think I know. Following the path of British-American writer Bill Bryson, let me approach this unsettled and unsettling time anew: “It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.”
May I see anew, looking at the familiar from another angle, and so find ways to act anew—for the climate, for my well-being, for a world aching for justice. I pray you are on this journey of renewal and discovery, too, today and every day, as you remember that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.
Blessings, Rev. Rita